One believes summer eternal, until the morning when one takes out again, without thinking, a longer garment.
The light no longer has quite the same whiteness: it leans, it gilds...
The nights, above all, have changed flavor; a coolness slips into them, timid still, but quite real.
The Chinese calendar has a word for this precise moment: Chǔshǔ, the end of heat.
The great breath of summer lays down its arms; not all at once, but like a tide going out, at a slow pace, leaving pools of heat behind it.
The breath that puts the heat away
处 chǔ cannot be translated in a single word: it carries the idea of “to hold”, of “to dwell”, but also of “to cease”, of “to put an end to”.
暑 shǔ is the moist heat of summer, the very heat announced by the great breaths of July, Minor and Major Heat.
Chǔshǔ, literally, is the heat one stops, the summer one puts away.
Fourteenth of the twenty-four breaths, it marks the moment when the high heat, at last, packs its bags.
The adage says it soberly: “The great heat withdraws; a time of settling and of transformation before the harvest.”
It is not coolness yet, it is the kept promise of its approach.
Between the tiger and the harvest
The withdrawal is never abrupt.
August keeps its bursts of heat in reserve; the famous “autumn tiger” (秋老虎 qiū lǎohǔ) can still roar. But the gap widens between the ardor of midday and the coolness of dawn.
The old almanacs noted three signs for Chǔshǔ: the eagle begins to hunt and to lay out its prey, nature begins to strip itself bare, the harvests gild the fields at last.
Chǔshǔ is also a breath of harvest.
In the Chinese countryside, one entered the great business of the year: bringing in the rice, storing the grain, thanking heaven for a kindly season.
The word “transformation” in the formula takes on its full sense here: what summer has ripened, the late season harvests and sets aside.
Settling before autumn
Still under the sign of Earth, Chǔshǔ invites the gesture of the center: to gather, to put away, to settle.
After the luminous stir of summer, it is time to come home a little into oneself as one brings in the harvest: without haste, with that quiet gravity of a season’s end.
The light turns slanting, the markets fill with gourds and the first grapes. Everything in the landscape murmurs that a page is turning.
The windows are opened again in the evening, the first soups come back out; the gestures of every day follow, without thinking, the movement of the season.
Worth discovering
To days that turn cool suits a rounder cup, warmer in the mouth.
Black tea with mandarin peel - 陈皮红茶 (Hong Cha Chen Pi) weds the mellowness of a red tea (hóng chá) to dried citrus peel, the famous chén pí, that mandarin skin patiently aged which China cherishes and with which it scents its kitchens.
From it is born an amber infusion, at once round and lively, whose sunlit citrus scent goes wonderfully with the tipping of summer towards autumn.
It is steeped at length and drunk warm, in small mouthfuls, in the golden light of late August.
A threshold cup, for tasting the withdrawal.
Towards full autumn
Chǔshǔ closes the chapter of summer, and with it the long season of Earth.
The next breath, Báilù, the “white dew”, will tip the year into Metal and into true autumn, that of cool mornings and dry clarity.
Before drying out, the year still grants itself a few days of gold and sweetness: the last of summer.
